Whatever Are We Coming To? Here Is a Good Nice Novel

By Eleanor R. Mayo S. J. Wilson, author of Hurray for Me (Crown, $4.50), and his publisher must be crazy. Here is a 320-page novel, published in the U.S.A. in 1964, without a dirty word, without a homosexual, without a single rape, without one psychiatrist! What in the world can they be thinking of?

A novelist's choice of material is his own affair and I do not object, per se, to any of the above items in any combination; but I found Hooray for Me as welcome as a breath of pure oxygen would be to a pedestrian on lower Broadway at high noon. If it doesn't indicate the beginning of a trend, I hope it is at least the harbinger of a little leavening.

IT IS a refreshing experience to sit down to a book concerned with people whose innate good will toward their fellows seems to outweigh their natural distrust and hatred-also about people who won't crawl into the wood-work the minute you turn your back. This may possibly be a process that takes over in times of national crisis-the locus of Hooray for Me is Brooklyn during the depression-but I certainly do not remember the depression years as a kindly time.

The action is seen through the eyes of a 5-year-old boy in the throes of becoming his father's boy instead of his mother's -in other words, beginning to grow up —and whatever there is in the way of suspense arises out of his inability to understand the world into which he is growing.

THE ACTION itself is disarmingly simple: the adventure of going to school and whether the right person will be waiting to take him home; the great garbage war between the forces of the women and the Acme Realty Co.; whether his best friend's mother is going to have a baby-and, when he finds out what is actually happening to her, his frantic attempts to discover from older brother, from the Italian barber's daughter, from the rabbi, whether mothers can really die.

Don't be put off by this

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REDBLOISTE PEOP

necessarily over-simplified UTASUN MERELDADA resume. This is a nice book and, more, it is a good nice book. The jacket might lead you to believe that Wilson has jumped on J. D. Salinger's bandwagon; but he hasn't and has no need to. His five-year-old who visualizes himself, on some fortunate da y, throwing jelly-

beans and gumdrops from the roof until everyone yells hooray for him, is a far cry from Holden Caulfield; and he is an individual in his own right.